This film takes a heightened, enervated approach to the filmmakers’ wider adaptation of Ronald Tavel’s 1971 play "The Last Days of British Honduras", which is transposed from the jungles of Belize to the urban geography of wintertime Chicago. In this storyline, an interloper, a gringo in the original play, plunges into a chamber drama involving ‘locals’ that touches on notions of destiny and rebirth, Meso-American mythology and the supernatural, race and the legacy of colonialism. By shifting the locale to Chicago, Sullivan and Sharmini deploy Tavel’s play as a vehicle for exploring an irrevocably bloody history and the uneasy state of contemporary race relations in North American cities.
Catherine Sullivan’s works engage a variety of media – theatre, film, video, photography, writing and sculpture. She has produced several performances and theatre works, which address a broad spectrum of historical reference. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, for example in the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Opéra de Lyon, Lyon; and Volksbühne, Berlin.
Farhad Sharmini was born in Tehran; he lives and works in Los Angeles. Sharmini has presented his work at venues in Los Angeles, Berlin, Vienna, and Athens, among other locales. Deriving in large part from sources in literature and film, this work, mostly sculpture and site-based pieces, combines narrative and theatrical elements with formal structuring.
Format: HD-video
Running time: 48 min
commissioned by ICO/LUX
